A reporter recently asked me whether (paraphrasing) “given Florida’s history of electing moderate Senators, what are the chances for someone like Marco Rubio?” As I’ve detailed earlier, political scientists have long evaluated political ideology in terms of numbers – most commonly scaling liberals to moderates to conservatives from -1 to 0 to +1. US Senators from Florida are fairly moderate, overall, but as of late appear to be becoming slightly more extreme. From the 80th Congress through the 100th Congress, the average (absolute value) of ideology of the Florida Senators was .141, but from the 101st through the 111th Congress, the ideology of the Florida Senators was .340. This difference is partially attributable to the replacement of Lawton Chiles by Connie Mack, and then Bill Nelson’s subsequent replacement of Connie Mack.
Yet what should be noted is that Marco Rubio’s DW-Nominate score places him at at about .700. That certainly places Rubio well to the extreme of any prior recent Florida Senator, and about as extreme as one of Florida’s first senators: Samuel Pasco (D).
How does Rubio compare to the current US Senate? At .700, only three US Senators score as conservative: INHOFE (OK), DEMINT (SC), and COBURN (OK). In the House, there are about 57 House Members who rate more conservative than does Rubio, including the recent winner of the CPAC Straw Poll, Ron Paul (TX) who achieved a DW-Nominate score of 1.348.
I have not yet figured out a way to assess Governor Crist's record on a similar scale, but Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has compiled a list of the Governor's positions that tends to demonstrate a much, much, more moderate record than Speaker Rubio's record. Silver compares Crist's stances to that of Senators Snowe and Collins - the two most liberal Republican Senators in Congress (.045 and .068).
